Letters

Feb was Fab

I think that your February 2007 issue is the BEST one ever. I'm not particularly
excited about the state of “Linux Media”; many of the news sources are
too geeky or too banal and boring. LJ is definitely one source that is
not with the rest.

The February issue has something for everyone: geeky stuff, professional/sys admin
stuff and general stuff. This is what I'm expecting from a magazine.
Some
of my favorite articles are the Perl and PHP integration one and the
udev one. Both articles are completely unexpected and extremely useful;
I have never seen anything covered close to it in any news source,
and I thoroughly enjoyed reading them!
Well done! And, please keep it up!

—
Dan

Document Rapid Change

I have a complaint about the way things get changed in Linux without
giving ignorant people like me sufficient clues.
I got a pre-installed Linux laptop and put my programs on it. Everything
was fine until I tried to build drivers. Things had changed!

More recently, I downloaded Fedora Core 6 and installed it, and then installed
svgalib. The demos failed to run, and a baffling message was issued:
“cannot restore segment prot after reloc; permission denied”. I asked
the svgalib maintainer for help and sent a bug report to Red Hat. They
pointed me to the source of the problem, which is SELinux. This is a new
thing (for me). Why couldn't the error message have mentioned the name
SELinux? And (a side issue) what kind of security policy lets me load
a library from a removable drive but not from the hard disk?

As a programmer who tries to make things for other people to use, I know
how easy it is to get lost in the details and fail to anticipate what
is going to trip somebody up. We all just have to try harder.

—
William McConnaughey

Long Live Freedom

Nice mag, I read it over here in the UK as an import to my local Borders
store.

I just read Nicholas Petreley's /var/opinion article in the February 2007
issue of Linux
Journal, and I agree with his point of not using Novell tools, and
hence aiding the MS strategy of infecting Linux with its intellectual
property. I would add the following points for spreading Linux (or more
generally, open-source software) freedoms:

1) Get Windows users started on OpenOffice.org and Firefox.

2) Public bodies need to use OOo and OSS where possible to ensure the
lowest possible cost and maximum freedoms from forced file format changes.

3) Schools should be using OOo and OSS for the reasons above, but also to
save the young from the indoctrination of the Windows/MS office toolset.

4) Do not promote the use of the Mono framework and C#, which has many
MS patents that could be used in a future legal backlash against
Linux. Better to use Java.

5) Support the concepts and goals of the Linux standard base (LSB)
initiative, so that the support burden can be reduced and many more apps
run without library searching and installation—not just Java.

—
Mark

Less Cooking More Eating

In the March 2007 Cooking with Linux, Marcel Gagnï¿½talks about Ekiga (GnomeMeeting), and as is often the case, manages to sell me on the idea of
using one of his suggested software picks. I was really interested
in trying out Ekiga, so I went to its Web site to download
it. Unfortunately, the site was hard to use (download was broken in a
few places), and I found that building the code required all the latest
installed software. I guess I'm not surprised that a GNOME-based piece
of software is incompatible with my 11-month-old, out-of-the-box R Cubed
Linux laptop, but I am disappointed that Gagnï¿½didn't make mention of
the fact that in order to build and install this software, you had to
be willing to re-engineer someone else's code or go out and purchase a
new computer with a fresh install of the latest GNOME desktop. Anyway,
please relay to Mr Gagnï¿½both my interest in his software picks as well
as my frustration in those same picks that are incompatible with the
bulk of existing Linux installations.

—
Evan Carew

Marcel replies:
First off, let me apologize for getting you started on what was obviously
a frustrating experience. I make it a point to avoid writing about
anything that requires too much effort to build and/or install. It's
2007,
and software installation under Linux shouldn't be that hard. There's
a reason I stopped giving instructions for building from source in my
articles. Binary packages are, for the most part, always a better idea
and less frustrating to the end user (programmers and hard-core geeks
excepted). Building from source should be a last resort.

I picked Ekiga partly because the bulk of modern Linux distributions
either come with Ekiga on the distribution CDs (or DVDs) or provide
downloads via their installation programs (such as Synaptic, YaST2,
DrakConf and
so on). These package managers take care of pesky issues like prerequisites
and hunting down missing software by automating the process. I did my
Ekiga tests on a Kubuntu system and another running Mandriva. Neither
required that I download source and build. Both ran “out of the
box”
without fuss.

As for the Ekiga Web site, I found none of the problems you experienced
when trying to download packages (since I did that as well). As for
issues with building GNOME software, what can I say other than
“ouch!” [insert appropriate smiley here].

My “mission” in the world of Linux and open-source software is largely
to simplify Linux, to demystify its complex image and to show people
that they don't have to be computer scientists to take advantage of the
benefits that FOSS offers. I want everybody to use Linux, and for that to
happen,
it needs to be accessible. It's not that hard, and it shouldn't be.

Double Negative Double Take

The Art of War

I have to admit that I haven't agreed with you very often in your
/var/opinion columns, but you hit the bull's-eye in this one [see Nicholas
Petreley's “Dealing
with the Devil” in the March 2007 issue].

Microsoft is taking a page out of Sun Tzu's Art Of War;
it likes to keep
its enemies close. Microsoft knows that Linux has become 100x the threat
that it ever thought it would be, and its philosophy has become one
of standing next to the competition in the buffet line to see what they
eat next.

I too would love to be able to support Microsoft. Heck, I used to be a
shareholder. Until it can play politely in the industry sandbox and
stop knocking everyone's sand castles over and attempting to replace
them with its shoddy imitations, I will hold Microsoft in contempt.

Great job on the magazine, I've been reading since the very first issue!

—
Gary

Doc's DIY Internet Infrastructure

For a while already, I've thought about building a community-owned fiber
network in my town.
So far, I've been thrown back, because it is almost impossible to get any one of
the big companies (Cisco, etc.) to call me back. And, face it, you need some
router, which you cannot buy at Best Buy around the corner. And, you also
need some funding. It is hard without even a quote from any of those
companies to write a business plan that will be accepted by any bank.

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